George Vancouver Quotes

When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending? “I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth—” Olive’s mother drinking coffee in Olive’s childhood home: yellow flowered tablecloth hands clasped around a blue coffee mug her smile “—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear, Captain George Vancouver stands on the deck of the HMS Discovery, gazing anxiously out at a landscape with no people in it “But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have now entered Holkham Bay, named by Captain George Vancouver in 1794. It has two branches, Tracy Arm to the north, and Endicott Arm to the south. “We are heading first into Tracy Arm, which was named by Lieutenant Commander Mansfield of the U.S. Navy, for Benjamin Franklin Tracy, Secretary of the Navy from 1889 to 1893. Mansfield, commander of the survey vessel, Patterson, in Alaska from 1889 to 1913, also named Sawyer Glacier, which you will see at the head of this arm, and which calves the hundreds of icebergs you will see floating in the waters of the arm. This passage was carved centuries ago during an ice age by a massive glacier which completely filled the channel. You can see the signs of its passing in the scoring of the bare rock walls. Avalanche chutes further scar the walls each spring and, as you can already see ahead of us, these are occupied by spectacular waterfalls. We will shortly stop near one of these so you can view it close up and feel how cold the water is coming directly off an unseen glacier at the top. “After visiting Sawyer Glacier, we will go back and turn up Endicott Arm, named for William Endicott, a member of the Massachusetts legislature and the U.S. Senate, to see Dawes Glacier. He was secretary of war from 1885 to 1891. Part way up Endicott Arm we will come to Ford’s Terror, a branch of Endicott Arm which has very strong tidal currents.

Very early on, in 1794, Captain George Vancouver (after whom the city of Vancouver is named) claimed the islands for Great Britain and hoisted its flag on several of the islands. However, his reports and actions were not ratified by London in time to be of any practical use. Furthermore, the Russians had also staked a claim over the islands of Hawaiʻi. The governor of Alaska at that time sent a vessel to Honolulu, ordering the construction of buildings that were fitted with mounted guns. They, too, hoisted the Russian flag over these buildings. Fortunately, King Kamehameha I built a large fort in Honolulu and expelled the Russians, eventually causing the Russian government to disavow their Russian agents. As the decades passed, the English residents of Hawaiʻi did not approve of or enjoy the American occupation of the islands.

Whoever passed on the virus, its effects were still visible a decade later in 1792, when the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. Like Cook’s crew in Kamchatka, he found a charnel house: deserted villages, abandoned fishing boats, human remains “promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers.” Everything they saw suggested “that at no very remote period this country had been far more populous than at present.